Stories of Newspaper Photography

Unknown Photographer, "Dorothy Cameron, Toronto art dealer," 1965

Gift of the Globe and Mail newspaper to the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada. (Every reasonable effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders to obtain permission to reproduce these images. We apologize for any inadvertent omissions. If you have any queries please contact: reproductions@ngc.ca.)

An exhibition of newspaper photography sure as hell better tell a good story.

But more than being some mere history of the Cold War era from which its black-and-white images are drawn, Cutline: From the Photography Archives of the Globe and Mail is a dog-eared shrine to the waning physicality of photographs as objects – chemically processed paper mementos that generations of cut-and-paste deadliners visually manipulated and labelled on the backside. These were then slid into the image morgue – though not forever, it turns out.

Unknown Photographer, "The Globe and Mail press room," 1952

Gift of the Globe and Mail newspaper to the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada. (Every reasonable effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders to obtain permission to reproduce these images. We apologize for any inadvertent omissions. If you have any queries please contact: reproductions@ngc.ca.)

The informative captions, the cutlines of the show’s title, play a big part in this fascinating exhibition, on view until Nov. 12 at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. The images, housed in museum-style cabinets, are clustered into a dozen non-linear thematic sections titled with caption excerpts. The groupings are as specific as the humble architecture of the small port of Moosonee, in Northern Ontario, or more generalized arrays like sports, celebrity and civil unrest, one of the few places where not every face is white.

While there’s a fair shake of newsy front-page images, it’s the pictures of a formal everyday Canada between the ’40s and ’70s – its classrooms, burlesque shows and diners – that truly illustrate a brick-and-rubber atomic-age world before logos were stuck on everything, everywhere. An entire section, for instance, is dedicated to women in furs and men in hats, once the norm.

Unknown Photographer, "Dave John Bryant and son in Toronto for peace demonstration," 1961

Unknown Photographer, "Along the new Highway 807, which runs from Smooth Rock Falls to Fraserdale, Ontario, there's not a sign of human habitation apart from one empty lumber camp," circa 1966

The 175-photo display followed the Globe’s decision to move its Toronto office, which required downsizing of an archive of some 750,000 prints. The first phase of an ongoing donation process saw some 24,000 photos gifted to the National Gallery of Canada’s nascent Canadian Photography Institute.

Three curators (London-based Roger Hargreaves and Toronto’s Jill Offenbeck and Stefanie Petrilli) culled images for the 12 categories – the first being the production of the newspaper itself. “Some of those are the most touching photographs,” says Cutline’s co-ordinating curator Ann Thomas. “They bring back an era that will not return.”

Affixed with four magnets apiece, the images are battle-scarred, creased and marked, sometimes with ridiculous crop lines that brutally amputate the photographer’s compositional eye but serve the editor’s view of what would work over the breakfast table.

In many ways, the orange grease-pencil lines that dictated what would be seen publicly are the philosophical pulse of the show, pointing us back to the Twitter age and the idea of #fakenews. After all, aren’t the truly ridiculous white-painted embellishments to pull dark figures from the shadows – and even the outright erasing of a body at a crime scene – complete manipulations? American writer Susan Sontag certainly had things to say about the destruction of reality that occurred the second a photo’s framing dictated what would be remembered. Cutline throbs with this dilemma, both as a document of bygone processes and in the images chosen for the show.

“This notion that we have that photography is a truth-telling vehicle is dubious right from the beginning,” says Thomas. “They started manipulating photographs almost right from the get-go. Maybe some of us are more gullible than others.” She notes, for instance, that the woman in Dorothea’s Lange’s iconic documentary photo of the Great Depression, Migrant Mother, had her thumb darkened to enhance the image.

Cutline’s highlights range from the mundane on up, and are not exclusively visual. A cabinet that includes Yousuf Karsh’s magnificent portraits of industrialists is labelled, hilariously, with a phrase pulled from a cutline: “Chemical valley has a heady smell of wealth and progress.” Another caption teases that Pierre Trudeau is riding a unicycle — cruelly, we don’t see the photo.

John Maiola, "Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau donned cleats for a kickoff that travelled less than 10 yards," 1968

Gift of the Globe and Mail newspaper to the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada.

What we do get of PET, though, shows him flying off a diving board and making an infamously weak 1970 Grey Cup kickoff. Sandwiched between these images, a grid of John Diefenbaker variously bored and grinning as he poses with a stream lesser politicians. Elsewhere, in a window box shared with Oscar Peterson, Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan, Dief’s surprising humour emerges as he holds a dour photo of himself and mimics his own expression. “It’s the last person I would expect to be able to laugh at himself like that,” says Thomas. “So we learn so much from these.”

Besides the illuminated displays of the scarred working photos, a sort of sideshow gallery with red walls has a selection of more artful images, framed and matted. This series, called The Canadians, is a gentle satire of American-Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s famous survey, The Americans, its images selected as the curators noticed parallels in the Globe’s donation.

An accompanying 172-page book includes an introduction by Douglas Coupland, who notes that all the politicians seem to be “about one-and-a-half porterhouse steaks away from a catastrophic heart attack.” Another insight from Coupland: “Everyone in this Canada looks so old – and everyone is trying to look the same.”

On this, the lack of Indigenous faces in Cutline is telling. Thomas says this reflects, to some degree, who was photographed – and who was ignored. Still, she says this is merely the first show to emerge from the donation. “I know there’s a lot of material, particularly from Alberta, from the late 19th century. As we look through the 24,000 photos, there are going to be more exhibitions and publications, and I hope some Indigenous curators will be interested in helping with that as well.”

Quite effectively, Cutline also projects Arthur Lipsett’s seven-minute paranoid and frantic 1961 NFB avant-garde collage film Very Nice, Very Nice, on the wall. A second film, assembled from the Globe stills, hijacks the soundtrack of the first.

The gallery offers, free for the taking, a special semi-gloss catalogue in the form of a broadsheet newspaper. It's a curio, for sure, as an addicted Instagram user probably speeds through more than the show’s 175 photos in a single day. Photography? “It’s like a weapon now,” Thomas says. “It blows you over.” But have things really changed that much? Long before today’s infinite feed of duck-face selfies and humble-brag vaycay pics, Cutline declares something well worth remembering: Filters? They’re nothing new.